Lately, I've been reading a lot of jump rope and clapping rhymes

[conuly]

Now, everything I read and remember about clapping games says that, usually, they're a girl thing. Boys either don't know them, or refuse to acknowledge they know them, or only admit they know them when coerced, or (at the very least) refuse to initiate these games.

So I was interested on the boat to see four kids - two girls, two boys - playing a game. The hands were the same as when I used to play "Oh little playmate" as a kid, but they weren't saying anything. Looked like the girls and one of the boys knew it, and they were trying to teach it to the fourth, but he was clumsy and (as the girls said, while refusing to themselves stop and show this kid properly) the other boy was teaching it "too fast", making it hard to see what to do.

This is a random commentary from my life. Gosh I'm tired.

Comments

[conuly]

I learned that one as a kid, too.

The one we really played a lot, though, was quack-dilly-oso. That one, everybody played. For a period in intermediate school, that was almost incessant - the girls played spit at lunch, the boys played table hockey, and in between times everybody played quack-dilly-oso.

My sister and I spent a summer in Belgium going to day camp, and we played it a lot there and taught the other kids. I like to think that maybe kids in Wavre still play this game, and that we're single-handedly responsible for importing the game to Belgium. (My mother says she's single-handedly responsible for bringing gummy bears to the US from Belgium, because she used to smuggle the confection out every time she visited and sell it to her friends, so I guess this is a fair exchange, culturally speaking.)